I've had an 8700c since November. Last week, I received an exchange device because of the dust problem. I was running Bharti and three third party applications (BBSpell, Google Maps, and the "c" compose utility). Everything ran perfectly on the old device. When I received the new device, I did a restore. Periodically now, my device will freeze up. I don't think that it's the device because I had the problem on an earlier exchange device, which I took back because of the freeze up problem.

Try this. Sync everything to Outlook....backup everything from the handheld and run through application loader, without making an automatic backup. Once done, sync everything from Outlook, then restore just certain databases:
Messages (obviously)
Content Store (pictures and ringtones)
PIN Messages (if you have any)
Saved Messages (if it's in the list)
BlackBerry Messenger (if you use it)

If it no longer freezes up, then it's a possibility that one of the databases that was backed up and restored was corrupted and that was causing the freezing.